The National Center on Addiction and
Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University has once again raised the
alarm about teens and marijuana. And once again, CASA head Joseph Califano
and his team of researchers appear to be playing games with the numbers in
order to advance an anti-marijuana political agenda in lockstep with drug
czar John Walters.

CASA's most recent report, released April
20, was sensational: "New CASA Report Finds More Teens in Treatment for
Marijuana Than for Alcohol or All Other Illegal Drugs Combined," shrieked
the headline on the CASA press release accompanying the report. "Huge
Increase in Emergency Room Admissions Among 12 to 17 Year Olds Where
Marijuana is Implicated," read the subheading. There has been a 142%
increase in teens in drug treatment for marijuana, the report noted.

And if the screeching all-caps headlines
were not enough to make the point, Califano was on hand to reiterate. "The
evidence is overwhelming that marijuana is a dangerous drug," he said in the
press release announcing the report. "Parents should recognize -- and help
their children understand -- that playing with marijuana is like playing
with fire. More kids are in treatment for marijuana dependence and abuse
than ever before, and marijuana is a culprit in an increasing proportion of
emergency room visits. Moreover, CASA's latest analysis provides increasing
evidence that marijuana is a gateway to other drug use. The more researchers
study the drug and the consequences of its use, the clearer it becomes that
teens who smoke pot are playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette, not
engaging in a harmless rite of passage."

Kudos to Califano for managing to stuff
three controversial and widely criticized ideas -- about teens in treatment,
teens in emergency rooms, and the gateway theory -- into the space of a
single paragraph. His work here would make the drug czar proud. But there is
no need to speculate about that, because Walters was up next.

As if evidence were needed that Califano
and CASA are working hand in glove with the drug czar, Walters gladly
provided it by contributing his own anti-marijuana rhetoric to the CASA
press release. "The CASA white paper reinforces the fact that today's
marijuana is very different from what was available in the 1970's and
1980's, in terms of its potency and addictive potential," Walters chimed in.
"Thanks to research such as this, we know more than we ever have about the
adverse health impacts of using the drug, particularly for our youth.
Marijuana poses a significant danger to young bodies and minds, and should
be a matter of serious concern for American parents."

It all sounds pretty darned scary, which,
of course, is precisely what Califano and Walters intended. But there is
less to the report than meets the eye. For starters, take the claim that
teens are flocking to drug treatment to get a grip on their marijuana
habits.

The numbers are indeed going up, but not
for the reasons CASA suggested. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) Drug & Alcohol Services
Information System (DASIS) Treatment Episode Data Sets (TEDS), which CASA
used, the increase in teen marijuana treatment is driven almost entirely by
referrals from the criminal justice system or the schools. In the most
recent TEDS numbers, only 16.6% of teen marijuana treatment episodes were
self-referrals, while nearly two-thirds (64.9%) were the result of referrals
from the courts (54.1%) or the schools (10.8%). An additional 10.3% of
treatment referrals came from health care providers. Another 8.6% of
referrals came from "other community," which can include defense attorneys
advising their young clients to cop a treatment plea.

"Why are there more teens in treatment for
marijuana now? Duh," snorted Mitchell Earleywine, author of "Understanding
Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence" and professor of clinical
psychology at the University of Southern California. "It's because you can
go to treatment or you can go to jail," he told DRCNet.

"This is bogus," said Paul Armentano,
Senior Policy Analyst for the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws (http://www.norml.org).
"If you take out all the referrals from the criminal justice system or
school authorities, you find that less than 17% of teens who underwent
treatment for marijuana checked themselves into treatment. What happens is
that someone is arrested for marijuana possession and he is offered a choice
between doing jail time or attending a treatment program. They either
volunteer or a judge orders them into treatment."

The increase in teen marijuana treatment
admissions is not due to high potency pot or people reporting negative
health consequences, Armentano told DRCNet, but to increased enforcement of
the marijuana laws. "In reality, the increase in treatment episodes merely
mimics the proportional increase that we have seen in marijuana arrests in
recent years," he explained. "The rise in treatment episodes correlates
strongly with the rise in arrests."

The upshot is that teenagers who do not
need drug treatment are undertaking it to avoid jail or other
unpleasantness. And the consequences of filling treatment slots with those
who don't need them extend beyond the teenagers in question. "The reality is
that every individual ordered to go to treatment because of marijuana is
taking bed space from people who could be addicted to hard drugs," said
Armentano. "If a large percentage of those people in treatment for marijuana
are there even though they don't meet the scientific criteria for treatment,
but because a judge didn't want to send them to jail, then we are just
wasting scarce and valuable treatment slots."

There are indeed a few who seek treatment
for their marijuana use, conceded NORML executive director Keith Stroup.
"Some people may decide they need help, and if they want treatment, that is
terrific," he told DRCNet. "But there is no increase in marijuana smokers in
treatment in the last few years except for those referred by the criminal
justice system. On the one hand, the cops and the courts pack these
treatment programs with people doing it to stay out of jail, and on the
other hand, people like Califano and Walters turn around and point to the
increase as evidence of a problem," Stroup growled. "That's bullshit. It
doesn't prove that marijuana is making more people seek treatment, it merely
shows that people will do almost anything, even undergo humiliating and
unnecessary treatment, to avoid going to jail."

Well, then, what about that high potency
marijuana sending kids to hospital emergency rooms? The numbers cited by
CASA come from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), a network of big city
emergency rooms that reports all visits where drugs are mentioned. Drug War
Chronicle has reported on problems in the DAWN statistics (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/252/futilityofdawn.shtml),
but it is worth repeating that under DAWN nomenclature an "emergency room
mention" of marijuana means not that marijuana caused the visit but only
that pot was one of up to four drugs mentioned by the patient. For example,
if a person is run down by a drunken driver and goes to the emergency room
and tells hospital personnel he smoked a joint that day, that is an
"emergency room mention" of marijuana.

The CASA report trumpets a 48% increase in
"mentions" of marijuana by young emergency room patients, but fails to
explain what a "mention" means, instead leaving readers to reach the
incorrect, but politically useful, conclusion that kids are overdosing on
high potency marijuana in droves. What is really occurring is that a
miniscule number (7,000 -- less than 0.5% of all emergency room drug
"mentions") of young people have arrived in emergency rooms saying they used
marijuana that day. And according to the DAWN numbers, nearly half of them
reported no problems related to their marijuana use but were there for other
reasons. The remainder cited "unexpected reactions" to getting high or other
non-life-threatening.

CASA and Walters would like to blame teen
marijuana-related emergency room visits on high potency weed. "Especially
troubling is the possibility that this rise in teen emergency department
mentions is related to the increased potency of the drug," the CASA press
release speculated. But marijuana experts aren't buying it despite repeated
statements from Walters and other prohibitionists that today's marijuana "is
not your father's pot" or is 10 or 20 or even 30 times stronger than
marijuana available in the 1970s.

"It is easily apparent that these estimates
of the increase in pot potency are really far off the mark," said
Earleywine. "They are based on estimates from the 1970s that suggested 1%
THC levels, but that was from marijuana police had in evidence that had been
sitting in hot evidence lockers for months before they sent it down to
Mississippi to be tested," he explained. "You don't even get high at 1% THC
levels. Now they're saying it's 20% THC, but that is extraordinary, and if
you look at the averages from other labs, you see that average potency has
increased two or three times since the 1970s, not the 10 or 20 times claimed
by people like Walters."

But don't take the word of Earleywine.
Here's what the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center had
to say about marijuana potency in its 2004 National Drug Threat Assessment
released this month: "Reporting from the Potency Monitoring Project
indicates that the average THC content in submitted samples of
commercial-grade marijuana was 5.03 percent in 2001 and 5.14 percent in
2002. In those same years, the average THC content in submitted samples of
sinsemilla was 9.60 and 11.42 percent, respectively. Rising marijuana
potency is perhaps more a factor of the demand for better quality marijuana,
however, than a reflection of marijuana's widespread availability. Marijuana
testing at 9.0 percent THC or higher accounted for 15.3 percent of submitted
samples in 2001 and 23.2 percent in 2002."

And besides, said Earleywine, that high
potency marijuana could be beneficial in some respects. "Data that
researchers Peter Cohen and Craig Reinarman have collected show that no one
reports getting any higher on high potency pot, they just smoke less to get
high. In that sense, high potency pot could be seen as harm reduction. There
is no lethal dose, so making marijuana stronger doesn't make it worse or
more dangerous. The idea that higher potency marijuana is leading to more
need for treatment does not seem to be the most parsimonious explanation,"
he said. It is also unclear that teenagers are actually buying and smoking
high potency marijuana, Earleywine said. "Go up to a teenager and ask him
whether he would rather buy a whole bag of Mexican pot for $100 or a couple
of grams of the high potency pot. Most teens have limited budgets; they
aren't even smoking the stronger stuff."

So much for the threat of "not your
father's pot." That leaves the claim that marijuana is a gateway drug, a
claim upheld not by the scientific community but only by prohibitionist
propagandists. The gateway theory has been debunked numerous times by
reputable scientists, including the National Academy of Science's 1999
Institute of Medicine Study on the medical uses of marijuana. While
researchers are apt to carefully couch their conclusions, the Institute of
Medicine was forthright: "There is no conclusive evidence that the drug
effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other
illicit drugs."

Other than misleading, distorting, or being
downright wrong on each of its major points, CASA's report on the teen
marijuana menace is a fine piece of science.